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sylvilel's review against another edition
2.0
A bit subjective and snobbish for my taste. Although it has a few useful tips, this is by my opinion mostly just a dusty old pile of condescension.
teamaven's review against another edition
3.0
What I learned from this book:
1) The Ambitious Guest is the only perfect short story. Everyone should be Nathaniel Hawthorne, but only as he wrote The Ambitious Guest.
2) No one should use first person narrators. Herman Melville was obviously mistaken.
3) Beginning writers should never use certain listed tropes, even those that many famous and brilliant writers have used successfully. They really couldn't have been that successful. Barrett says so.
In earnest, though, while I found much of the examples and "Do not do's" to be ridiculous, this book has some solid advice. In the context of a literary analysis course, it was quite useful. It has a good breakdown of the varieties of short stories, and it discusses much of the craftsmanship of good writing successfully. It's not the first writing book that I would recommend, and it has several short comings--notably, that the author shows severe bias to his own writing tastes, and, that since it was written at the turn of the century it is rather dated. Even so, it was free, and for me it was a textbook (best of all, a free textbook!) for my Short Story analysis college class. It was used well in that context.
1) The Ambitious Guest is the only perfect short story. Everyone should be Nathaniel Hawthorne, but only as he wrote The Ambitious Guest.
2) No one should use first person narrators. Herman Melville was obviously mistaken.
3) Beginning writers should never use certain listed tropes, even those that many famous and brilliant writers have used successfully. They really couldn't have been that successful. Barrett says so.
In earnest, though, while I found much of the examples and "Do not do's" to be ridiculous, this book has some solid advice. In the context of a literary analysis course, it was quite useful. It has a good breakdown of the varieties of short stories, and it discusses much of the craftsmanship of good writing successfully. It's not the first writing book that I would recommend, and it has several short comings--notably, that the author shows severe bias to his own writing tastes, and, that since it was written at the turn of the century it is rather dated. Even so, it was free, and for me it was a textbook (best of all, a free textbook!) for my Short Story analysis college class. It was used well in that context.